Renee Reynolds moved her family of five into Sunrise Serenity, a mobile home park on Serenity Circle in Fairfield, Maine, about two years before C37 Capital LLC bought the property in 2020. By 2022 the water ran at low pressure with a brown tint, she told The Maine Monitor. It sometimes caused skin breakouts. Her family felt unclean after showering. They started bathing and doing laundry at a relative's house, and the dishes piled up at home.
In February 2023 the water stopped entirely for five days with no warning. Park management ran a small gray hose across the Reynolds driveway from a neighbor's connection. An email later said the well had gone dry. Boiling enough water for five people, for drinking and cooking and washing, was exhausting, Reynolds said. Bottled water kept adding to the grocery bill week after week.
She eventually left. It took years of saving, a nearby lot willing to accept a mobile home, and $3,500 to move the structure, which the lot owner lent her. In 2023 the family relocated to a site served by town water.
The park's water system is still operating. The boil-water order is still active. As of September 2026, Maine's drinking-water alert page lists Sunrise Serenity under a systemwide boil-water requirement because of low pressure. Some version of that order has been in place since 2023.
The people who stayed
Most of the residents still living in Sunrise Serenity wouldn't give reporters their names. Five who spoke to The Maine Monitor in early 2026 asked for anonymity because they feared being evicted for talking. The company that holds their leases also owns the water system, and its registrant, Mark Hsu, signed the consent order promising to fix it. Neither the owner nor the park manager answered the outlet's calls, emails, or letters over four weeks of reporting.
Their days, as documented: one mother avoids sprinklers, kiddie pools, and gardening, and sometimes rents a hotel room so her children can shower before school. Another resident drives to a truck stop to shower. A third said sediment had destroyed three washing machines and that moving the home was financially out of reach. Six current and former residents told the outlet they had stopped drinking the tap water. Households described buying pallets of bottled water or five-gallon jugs.
Park management supplied water during some shutdowns, not all. Residents gave The Maine Monitor ten separate management notices for shutdowns since 2023, and there were more interruptions during excavation work in March 2026.
Nobody here can point to the morning it failed. It got worse in pieces, the brown tint and then the outages and then the boil notice and then the test results, until household routines rearranged themselves around the water instead of the other way around. What the system doesn't deliver, people drive to get.
What testing found
Maine designated Sunrise Serenity a regulated public water system in May 2023, once its population crossed the threshold that requires state oversight. Testing began then, and the results arrived in layers.
June 2023: coliform bacteria, including E. coli. The state required a boil-water notice. July 2023: six PFAS compounds at a combined 275 parts per trillion, nearly fourteen times Maine's interim limit of 20. PFAS are synthetic chemicals linked to cancer and other health effects, sometimes called forever chemicals because they don't break down in the environment. They had been in the water. How long, nobody can say, because nobody had tested the wells before the state took jurisdiction.
The state and the park attributed the low pressure and contamination risk partly to leaks in the distribution lines. Maine repeatedly directed management to disconnect one heavily contaminated well. The park disconnected it, ran out of water, and reconnected it.
Maine issued nine drinking-water-rule violation notices and granted at least four compliance extensions before tightening oversight. In February 2026, Hsu signed an administrative consent order requiring monthly coliform testing, treatment installation, leak identification and repair, and more frequent PFAS testing, with violations exposing the company to legal action or fines of up to $4,000. In March, the state issued another notice, this one for failure to document corrective action after a positive coliform test.
The treatment that works and the order that stays
Maine awarded the park a $249,000 grant for treatment and storage work. PFAS treatment was installed in September 2025, and state lab results from January 2026 show PFAS as nondetect at the treatment point.
That filter is doing its job where it's measured. The boil order stays because of pressure, which treatment doesn't touch. To lift it, the system has to produce negative bacteria tests for twelve consecutive months. That count started sometime after the consent order was signed in February 2026. A single positive test resets it.
Earlier this year I wrote about a small water district in Colorado where the water was testing clean, the district had one operator left, and nobody had a plan for the day he retired. Passing a sample and being able to keep passing samples are two different capacities. At Sunrise Serenity the split runs a different way: the filter works at the sample point while the pipes downstream leak, the pressure drops, shutdowns continue, and people keep boiling.
The structural trap
Moving a mobile home costs thousands of dollars, requires finding a lot that will take it, and risks damaging a structure that may not survive the trip. Reynolds managed it after years of saving and a loan from her new lot owner. The people who stayed are working through a calculation most homeowners never face: they own the house, someone else owns the ground under it, and that same someone owns the wells and the pipes. Complaining publicly puts the lease at risk. Leaving means abandoning the home or paying to move it somewhere that may not exist.
This turns up wherever mobile home parks run their own water systems. The park owner holds the housing, the land, and the utility, and residents who depend on all three have little leverage over any of them. Maine's consent order and grant money are real intervention, more than many communities in this position get. But that intervention runs on monthly sampling, twelve-month compliance periods, quarterly PFAS tests, enforcement steps that could eventually produce fines.
The residents run on how long it takes to boil a pot, how far it is to the truck stop, whether today is a hotel-shower day. In Valley Mills, Texas, a private well failed one morning and the customers organized a repair inside a week. At Sunrise Serenity the failure has lasted three years, and there is no single repair to organize around.
What it would take
For the water here to be reliably safe, treated and also delivered at adequate pressure without shutdowns or sediment, the distribution lines need repair, the pressure problem needs a structural fix, and twelve clean bacteria tests need to land in sequence. Connecting the park to Fairfield's municipal water would be more durable, but no consolidation proposal appears on Maine's current project list.
Maine can't force that connection, and it can't appoint an administrator to take over a failing private system the way Texas regulators did in Valley Mills. California can. Its SAFER program has completed 180 consolidations since 2019, most of them voluntary, and even there the distance between identifying a failing system and getting safe water to a tap can stretch a decade. Riverdale, in Stanislaus County, has had uranium in its well since at least 2016; construction began in May 2026.
What Maine has deployed at Sunrise Serenity is close to its full toolkit: violation notices, compliance extensions, a consent order, a $249,000 grant. Everything after that depends on the park owner complying, the treatment continuing to work, the leaks being found and repaired, and twelve monthly bacteria tests coming back clean in a row.
Renee Reynolds found a way out. It cost $3,500, years of planning, and a loan from her new lot owner. The families still on Serenity Circle are waiting on the twelve-month count, on the pressure, on the leaks, on the system becoming what they assumed it already was when they moved in. Whether it gets there depends on a park owner who hasn't answered reporters, a state agency working through its enforcement process, and a set of wells and pipes that have been failing longer than anyone was officially counting.